Category talk:Molecular manufacturing
From Wise Nano
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Dumb question about nanofactory animation by 64.243.24.210 15:33, 10 Nov 2004 (CST)
I went to the October 2004 conference in Washington DC, and I saw the preliminary version of the nanofactory animation. It looked great. But what I couldn't figure out from what I saw was whether it had any flexibility: it appeared to have conveyor belts in fixed locations with fixed tool-tips. Am I being dumb here?
If the conveyor belts can be moved around and re-routed (like the Hogwarts staircases) and the tool-tips can be changed, then maybe there's a case for flexibility. But that wasn't apparent from the animation, at least not to me.
oops, neglected to log in by Wware 15:34, 10 Nov 2004 (CST)
That last piece of dunce-itude was mine (Will Ware).
Just a sketch by Brett Bellmore 20:38, 10 Nov 2004 (CST)
The animation was in effect just a preliminary sketch, nothing more. Very incomplete, and a lot of the details show were wildly wrong.
What was shown at the smallest level was a molecular mill, intended for manufacturing the same small product repeatedly, with high efficiency. Most products will probably consist of a mix of standardized blocks, and so a good deal of the nanofactory will consist of molecular mills for producing them, and storage areas where they can be accumulated.
There will be other systems capable of more flexible manufacture, based on robot arms rather than cam driven machinery. But that sort of thing is very energy expensive to operate, and such blocks will be reserved for where they're absolutely necessary.
And, yes, between the system manufacturing the blocks, and the face where they're assembled into the final product, you'll need a transportation system with switching capability.
I'm hoping the new animation will take a great deal of this into account, and look more realistic. A lot of detail that wasn't shown has already been worked out, I expect.
Productive Nanosystems video by Jim moore 21:38, 10 Nov 2004 (CST)
The molecular mills in the video took acetylene and processed the molecule, taking off the two hydorgens then adding the two carbon atoms to a small work piece on a conveyor. As the work piece went down the conveyor more mills added carbon atoms to the work piece. The work piece was very small, it was shown as a cube like object with ~10-14 carbon atoms per side, making the work piece a couple of cubic nanometers in size. These work pieces are transported to other conveyors and then plugged into a growing work face.
I see a couple of problems with the design on video.
1.) It only shows the construction of non-terminated diamondiod objects. I would have liked to see the site specific deposition of hydrogen onto the work piece. Also if the object that you are assembling needs to conduct electricity you need carbon in its graphitic form. Graphite might also be necessary to achieve ultra low friction in moving / sliding parts. So we are missing a mechanism for the creation of graphitic structures.
2.) I think that the work pieces (shown as ~2 cubic nanometers) needed to be assembled into larger functional blocks (~ 8,000,000 cubic nanometers) before being added to the work face. If you do not have larger standardized functional blocks it is much more difficult to design macro-scale devices.
3.) The mills are not shown to be programable.
